Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in Missouri and moved to Georgia almost fifty years ago as a VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) volunteer. After over three decades of service, I retired from Georgia state government.
Louetta
My aunt lived in a cluster of duplex apartments for senior citizens and persons with disabilities in Trimble, a small town in western Missouri. When I knocked on the aluminum screen door, I almost didn’t hear a faint “Come in.” I entered, anxious to see her and hopeful she would have the strength to visit.
Judy, her daughter, informed me Louetta’s heart was giving out, and she was in hospice. I called her. She was agitated about her circumstances. Recounting the events leading to her prognosis, she said she did not want to go to the hospital, did not want to spend the night there, and did not want to be in hospice. She said she felt worse now than when she went to the emergency room. She could not do anything or go anywhere. She said she had a heart ailment but didn’t know the details. I told her I would be seeing her in a few weeks.
Uncovering shreds of optimism, I had known patients who lived for months in hospice, one for a year and a half. But my awareness of others, including my dad, who died within days of admittance, weighed on me. The doctor explained to Judy that they used an indicator to measure heart health—most people were at fifty, but her mom was at twenty. While I thought Louetta’s numbers sounded ominous, they remained abstract, implausible evidence she was on the verge of death.
On the drive to see her, two related remembrances stood out. At a holiday gathering—Thanksgiving or Easter—after the midday dinner, I remember standing in the doorway to the kitchen where the women, having cleaned up, sat around the table. I was sixteen or seventeen. Louetta announced in a joking manner that I was her second son, noting I spent much of the summer at her place working for her husband, Jiggs. I briefly felt special, and my cheeks became warm. My mom flashed an affected smile, which she often gave in social settings. On the drive home, Mom said in a low-pitched, rapid delivery to my dad, “He’s not her son. She shouldn’t say that. I don’t know where she got that idea.” Her reaction startled me. Did she notice my mien as I stood in the doorway? I had an inkling my dad’s family looked down on Louetta and Jiggs, and her resentment broached the possibility Mom concurred with their disdain.
In a Christmas card she sent a year or two after her son died and seven or eight after my mom died, Louetta wrote that since my mother and Mike were gone, I could be her son, and she could be my mother. Her suggestion produced a mixed reaction. It elicited a longing to see her, to reminisce and talk about unimportant matters, an aging son paying respects to his elderly parent. Yet it raised an uneasiness, evoking Louetta’s “second-son” remark and my mom’s response to it years ago. She never said anything further about it, and neither did I.
* * * *
She sat on a cloth-covered recliner, fragile and wasted. Her mouth hung open. Her glasses with large rectangular lenses in a brown frame accentuated her thin face and wrinkled brow. Penny-sized age spots dotted her pale arms. She had an oxygen tube going from her nose and looping around her ears. Her long, thin hands, with protruding veins and tendons, rested on her lap. She wore a blue patterned, short-sleeve blouse that drooped from her shoulders and baggy blue jeans. She smiled and motioned me to lean over and hug her. Her unanticipated vigor heartened me.
Judy was with her. For the first time in our seventy-plus years, she hugged me. Her embrace reminded me of a phone call we had a week or two before in which Judy said, with a hitch in her voice, I was the only Wade who talked to them. Neither she nor I were sentimental, and her choking up on the phone embarrassed me. But this day, she had control of herself, relieving me of unwelcome discomfort.
Over the next two-plus hours, Louetta’s granddaughter and a neighbor joined us. The conversation ranged from cell phone complaints to sleep schedules and what we eat for breakfast. For a minute, we speculated whether her sisters-in-law (my aunts) were still alive. The cordial and meandering nature of our confab prompted a sensation similar to when I spent summer evenings with Louetta and Jiggs, as folks dropped by—mostly her relatives—to chat about the day and swap gossip. Plagued with acne, girlfriendless, and avoiding my parents and siblings at home, I surprised myself by saying whatever popped up in my mind, uninhibited by my natural shyness, accepted as part of their family. But one discordant remark disrupted this reverie.
In a quiet delivery, Louetta stated she didn’t like being around dying people. “I didn’t want to get close to Mike when he was in the nursing home. I stood at the end of his bed.” She said, “I’m afraid I won’t see them again.”
She conveyed she didn’t get up until 9:00, so I called Louetta to ensure she was awake before dropping by the following morning. I arrived at around 10:00. Judy soon showed up. She had taken my picture the day before, and I realized I didn’t have a recent likeness of her or her mom. Shamefaced over my dereliction, I got several photos of them on my smartphone. After an hour of chitchat about my trip home and the weather, we said our goodbyes. Louetta again impressed me with the strength of her hug. Her final words were, “We might not see each other again. Take care of yourself, OK?”
Returning to Georgia, phone calls with Louetta during the previous decade echoed in my head. She had a falling out with Mike when she gifted him her house that he sold at the urging of his substance-abusing wife. They later divorced, and Louetta forgave him. In the recent past, almost every time we talked, she asked if I had heard from my brother. When I said I hadn’t, she fussed at me, “That’s not right. You need to get in touch with him.” We had one exchange I won’t forget.
About six years earlier, Mike had a severe stroke and ended up in a nursing home. On a call with Louetta, I asked how he was doing, and she responded in wonderment rather than her characteristic gloominess, “A Black guy takes care of him. Can you believe that?” I replied with something like, “Oh really?” She said again, as if she still didn’t believe it, “A colored guy looks after him,” in a soft tone connoting Mike liked him. Her account stirred a memory from when I was maybe sixteen. She came home from a Saturday at the Kansas City farmer’s market furious. “A nigger stole fifteen dollars from me. She bought a couple dozen eggs and gave me a five-dollar bill. I put it in the cash box and got her change. When I handed it to her, she said she’d given me a twenty. She was lying. It was a five, but I couldn’t argue. I had put it in the box.”
* * * *
On Louetta’s ninety-fifth birthday, I received an email from her oldest granddaughter, Sandy. They had moved Louetta to a long-term care facility, and Sandy had been with her for two days. She wrote Louetta had spent the previous day dozing and talking a little. She had said nothing since then, though Sandy noted she “squeeze[d]my hand.”
The next day, Sandy emailed again: “Grandma passed at 2:15 this morning…glad you came to see her. She talked about you frequently. Going to miss her.”
Although I knew Louetta would die at any moment, reading this email dazed me. To collect myself, I got busy with the logistics of going to her funeral by getting an airline ticket, checking the weather in Missouri, and packing. Yet her face, worn and gaunt, hovered over my thoughts.
Her visitation and funeral were held at the same place as Mike’s visitation five years earlier. I pulled into the gravel parking lot of the building that once housed the post office. In the vestibule, a wrinkled, white-haired man wearing an ill-fitting gray suit, white shirt, and tie dangling from a collar too big for his skinny neck greeted me as I signed the guest book. Inside, I glanced around. The room hadn’t changed: dark faux wood paneling, low tiled ceiling, and pale, worn carpeting. A good-sized crowd had gathered, filling up two-thirds of the seventy or eighty chairs. I saw Judy and Sandy at the front by the casket, accepting condolences. They had arranged pictures of Louetta, her children, and grandchildren on several large boards by the casket. Three or four gray-haired ladies sat on the front row close to the display, two of whom I presumed were Louetta’s surviving sisters.
I gazed at Louetta’s body, lying in repose like a wilted flower. When young, she was strong and took on unfeminine tasks—mowing pasture, lifting fifty-pound bags of chicken feed—but in her later years, she lost much of her vigor—using a walker for short spans like in her apartment and a wheelchair to traverse the long nursing home hallway when seeing Mike. However, when listening to her speak, her timbre and pitch sounded as it did in my childhood. Midway through her tenth decade, her careworn mien told of a woman who lost her husband and four of her seven siblings and a loss she never anticipated, her son.
No one present, outside of Louetta’s immediate family, knew me well, and no one approached me that afternoon. Uncertain about how to dress, I wore a sweater vest with gray trousers and a blazer, and I stuffed a tie into a side pocket in case I needed it. But the guys came in jeans, even those over sixty, and while many women had on dressy sweaters and pants, some wore jeans and sweatshirts. For a few moments, I thought their attire was too casual. But I had second thoughts because the men induced an image of Louetta’s father wearing bib overalls to his grandson Mike’s wedding. While no one looked at me, I felt all eyes were on me.
I said a few graceless words to Judy and her daughter. Turning from them, I scanned the room, trying to situate myself. My forehead became warm, and my hands became clammy as I sought to blend in. I glimpsed one of my aunt’s friends on the aisle and wandered over to say hello. Though he had been loquacious in prior interactions, he gave clipped one- or two-word replies to my utterances and made furtive glances over my shoulder, cutting off my attempts at small talk. I couldn’t muster the resolve to go to the front row and offer condolences to Louetta’s sisters. Staring at the floor and trying not to slink, I stepped to the last line of chairs, where no one was sitting, and settled in a spot where I would be out of the way. I read the program, and when I finished, I reread it.
A silver-haired guy in his sixties, decked out in black—jacket, pants, and shirt without a tie, aping Johnny Cash—conducted the service. His tribute contained specifics—she once cared for six hundred chickens and was one of those good-looking “Waters girls”—and generalities that could apply to any upright person. Bringing Judy and Sandy glasses of water during the visitation before the service, his attentiveness impressed me. From his tempo and diction, I inferred he was a local preacher but subsequently found out he owned the funeral home. He did a decent job eulogizing someone he didn’t know.
Afterward, while the mourners dispersed, the older man in the baggy gray suit shuffled up to Judy. I heard him say he had known her mother, though not catching anything else. His gesture elicited a smile on her tired face, gratifying me.
* * * *
A smaller crowd gathered at the gravesite for the interment. Some of Louetta’s younger kin—like her, they had thin, hooked noses, confirming their relatedness—milled around calling out to the others when they spotted graves of relatives. As we waited for the hearse, I self-consciously stayed apart. But after several minutes. I approached Judy, who stood by her grandson. Recalling what Louetta told me, I commended him for insisting everyone in the family get vaccinated and wear masks during the pandemic. He glanced at Judy and murmured, “See.”
Though not weeping, Judy’s tawny cheeks drooped around her mouth, and dark semi-circles underscored her blue eyes. She spoke in a slow, irregular cadence as if sleep-deprived. Gazing at her reminded me of her mother’s revelation during my final visit that Judy was experiencing deep sadness and undergoing therapy. She also said her daughter, whom I did not deem religious, had joined a church. These disclosures highlighted my observation Judy had taken on a different personality: more emotion—the unexpected hugging and undeniable despondency— but none of the trademark sarcasm of even three or four years earlier.
I told her I would miss her mom. I paused for a moment, worried I’d utter another bromide. Then, in an assertion I couldn’t curb, I said, “I considered your mom a second mother.” Without hesitating, she said in a consoling voice, “I know you did.”
